The Heiress Trap

“Happy birthday, Ceci!” my three-and-a-quarter-year-old self cheered, chubby hands waving in the air, honey-blonde pigtails—laden with technicolour ribbons—twitching like real pigs’ tails.

Cecily blew out the two candles sitting on her pink Barbie cake and clapped wildly before any of us had the chance to do it for her.

Us meant myself, Mum, and Dad.

It had always been just the four of us, right up until Dad passed away. Then Mum remarried, started a brand-new family, and from age seven onward, looking after Cecily became my responsibility.

I loved my little sister to bits. She was my whole world, my baby. With Mum completely consumed by her younger kids—our half-brothers, Jaiden and Jason—I took over because I couldn’t watch the neglect. Ceci was just going on six then. I’d wake her up each morning, make her breakfast, walk her to and from school, and keep an eye on her at the playground. I braided her hair, helped her with homework, read her bedtime stories, and whenever a nightmare woke her up, I’d leap out of my bed and rush into hers to hold her until she felt safe.

In Jack’s house all those years, we learned to live like ghosts. He hated any reminder that we existed, resentful that his wife’s kids were part of the marriage bargain.

The moment I was old enough to work and earn a proper wage, I saved enough to rent a small flat and get us away from him. Ceci could finally thrive in a home free from Jack’s toxicity, throwing herself fully into her studies.

Smart as she was, she earned a place on a full scholarship to Wakefield College—the secondary school every child dreamed of attending. It was prestigious, exclusive and brutal to get into, even for the wealthiest families, who had to go through hell just to secure a slot. For people like us, it was a world that existed far beyond our reach.

And my sister got in—with a perfect score on the Wakefield Trust pilot entrance exam!

The chairman of Wakefield Enterprises, Donald Wakefield himself, stepped onto the podium to hand her the award. That was how impressive my sister was.

I was so proud of her.

She transferred to Wakefield College at the start of the academic year. I drove her to campus myself in my beat-up little VW. When we arrived, I stood there for ten minutes with my mouth open, just taking the school in.

I’d bet not even a university campus could rival those grounds. I’d walked by Buckingham many times, knew the palace was grand, but Wakefield was on another level.

The place felt less like a school and more like a private little kingdom. The main buildings, constructed like a sprawling medieval castle, were vast and stood at the centre of acres of manicured lawns, various sports fields and hedged gardens. The girls’ dormitory occupied a fortress at one end, while the boys’ resided in a matching estate at the other, and three massive stone structures in between the dormitories were the academic centres.

Just the sanctuary to leave my little princess, I’d thought at the time.

Ceci called almost every night at first. The first week, her voice was full of light. She loved everything about the school: the majestic lecture halls, the priced libraries with their rare volumes, and her dorm room—a space all her own. After years of sharing a room with me, having that meant everything to her, I could tell. And the food, she said, was fit for royalty.

By the second week, the calls grew shorter and less frequent. She said she was busy with studies, drowned in coursework. But I didn’t like the dullness in her tone. She sounded exhausted, worn to the bone, and a few times I could have sworn she was crying, even though she argued she was fine.

Once, in the background of a call, I heard a group of girls laughing.

“Hey, slut, have you cleaned the toilet yet!” someone had yelled.

When I asked Cecily if they were referring to her, she had let out a tight, choked laugh and adamantly insisted they were just friends playing around, and quickly hung up.

I worried constantly about her, but not enough to convince me that her troubles were worse than the world she’d left behind—which was still my reality: grinding through three jobs and coming home to a cramped flat where I had to crouch just to take a shower.

I was wrong. Dead wrong.

And now, my sister was gone.

She wasn’t dead—that would at least offer the mercy of a body I could lay to rest and say goodbye.

Just... gone.

A call first came from a student at the school. Ceci had given her my number to get me in case of an emergency. She said she was a friend and was worried because Ceci had run away from school. She felt she “didn’t fit in” and had been dropping subtle hints about leaving for a while, according to this dormmate.

I got in touch with the school immediately. Even now, the memory of that smooth, detached voice that had spoken to me sent goosebumps up my arms and left a bitter taste of bile in my throat. I could tell that the administrator didn’t find the situation worrisome. She confirmed, offhandedly, that Ceci indeed hadn’t been in school for a while and that she had withdrawn from the school. That was their neat, convenient explanation for keeping their institution’s reputation entirely out of it. She had withdrawn. On her own.

“Then, where is she? Where did she go from there?”

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss our student’s personal circumstances.”

“I’m her sister,” I had yelled in desperation. “Tell me the truth... did she run away?”

“She has withdrawn, Miss Everest,” she had only repeated.

Her whereabouts were none of their concern, so long as they could prove that Ceci had left the school voluntarily. They didn’t even offer to join me in a search when I suggested it—not even to humour me. To them, my sister was just a minor problem, easily swept under the rug. When I kept pressing, they simply advised me to file a police report if I felt it was necessary.

I did.

The officers opened a file, threw me a couple of routine updates over the next forty-eight hours, and then the line went cold. Now, every time I dragged myself into the station, the same tired officer would glance up from her desk and give me the same empty empathy.

“Isla, I’m not saying I don’t believe your sister’s case is critical. I’m saying we’re working on it with everything we’ve got, but we haven’t got much to go with. She’s a teenager... We can only hope against hope that one day, she’ll come back on her own.”

No one needed to tell me Wakefield had already supplied them with a nice narrative that had convinced them there was little reason to pour resources into searching for her.

But what if she never comes back on her own?

I knew my sister better than anyone. Cecily was not a quitter. She had a fire in her, a fierce drive to change our destiny, to get the absolute best education possible, land a good job, and drag us both out of the rags we were stuck in. And she was relentless. Hadn’t she already done the impossible by earning her way into Wakefield College—a penniless girl from the slums standing among the elite?

Why would she throw away all that sacrifice and hard work just because a few privileged brats made her life miserable? It didn’t make a single grain of sense.

But everyone else thought it did. Even our own mother couldn’t be bothered to probe.

I wiped a tear from my cheek, watching Cecily’s tiny hands on the screen cut her birthday cake and hand a slice out to each of us.

We had been such a happy family back when Dad was still alive.

As I clicked the TV off, the room fell into heavy silence.

It was one in the afternoon—time for my shift at Best Eatery. I was going to have to call in and pass on it again, making it four missed shifts in a row. If I kept this up, the manager wouldn’t care that I was frantically searching for my sister; she’d just replace me, and I’d lose the little income helping to keep a roof over my head. But what choice did I have? I had to find her. The rain had stopped. I had to go continue putting up flyers.

I pulled my hoodie over my head, grabbed the thick stack of missing person flyers from the table, and stepped back out into the biting cold.

By now, our street and the surrounding blocks were plastered with Cecily’s face, but I kept adding more. Wherever a flyer had been torn down from a lamp post, I replaced it. Whenever someone on the sidewalk paused long enough to make eye contact, I pressed a slip of paper into their hands. I walked up and down the pavement for hours until the sky turned black and my stomach was groaning.

“God, please let today’s effort bring a lead,” I whispered under my breath before opening the door to my apartment.

Inside, it was pitch-black and very quiet. It had never been like this before Cecily left for school. Back then, no matter how late I worked, I’d come home to the lights on and find her bent over her books at the desk. I stared at that empty wooden table with a hollow ache in my chest, wishing with all my heart I had never let her go to that school.

I pulled last night’s leftovers from the mini-fridge, microwaved them, and ate my lonely dinner on the couch in front of the dark TV screen.

I did my best to keep hope alive most of the time—tried to imagine her safe from what had hunted her out of town. I wanted so badly to believe she was in another city, enrolled under a new name and thriving in a new school, keeping her head down while searching for a secure way back to me.

But at times like this, when my mind was free to wander, it took a detour down a darker road.

I saw her again, tied to a chair in the dark, badly bruised and bleeding, screaming my name. Her helplessness brought stabbing tears to my eyes, and soon they were falling in torrents. My heart clenched painfully as the terrifying thought returned: what if my gut feeling was right?

No. It wasn’t!

I forcefully swallowed that awful thought .

It was wrong.

It had to be.

My sister was coming back to me alive. I needed to hold her, wrap my arms around her and whisper how sorry I was for failing to protect her.

I pushed down the rest of my food, crawled into bed and stared blindly at the ceiling until sleep finally claimed me.

What woke me wasn’t my alarm. The room was still drowned in darkness. It was the ping of a text message hitting my phone.

I was about to roll over and ignore it, assuming it was a late-night spam alert, until two words caught my eye on the lock screen: your sister.

I stared at the message, barely breathing.

Someone knew where Cecily was.

I grabbed the phone so quickly it nearly slipped from my hand, my thumb scrambling to open the message.

I saw your flyer today. You’re looking for your sister, Cecily Everest. I can help with that. Call me.

Beneath the text was a series of digits.